d1/82,000 words

I am getting ready to start on the final act of my first draft. Unfortunately, I enterer into this project with a lot of excellent worldbuilding and sci-fi details, but very little plot. I also had some interesting character ‘events’, meaning some interesting coincidences and sparks in their backstory. What I was lacking was a clear understanding of the characters themselves, their arcs, and the story I wanted to tell in this freshly-built world. This is not the way I would ever write another story, but it is what it is and I certainly think I can retrofit the story in a satisfying way. However, it does make things more difficult.

The specific problem this approach has created is that I do not have a clear idea of my ending or my final conflict. I have a number of ideas I like, but ultimately the options are wide open, even though I am nearly ready to start laying words to those final chapters. The task ahead of me is to focus on the conflict, and flesh out the way it should unfold. Specifically, I need to find a way to make each character resolve their conflicts by leveraging their special abilities. For Nick, that means either his Spawn nature, his lack of memory, or his Mute Elevated nature. His primary nemesis is Golithias. For Evaya, that means her immunity to overdraw. Her primary nemesis is the Erebossi. So that is the name of the game for the next month: find the right sequence that makes sure each character’s key abilities enable their final victory.